I love free-improv music and noise music (when in the right frame of mind), but I’m well aware that most people don’t share this love. Most people are either baffled by it or incredulous that anyone might want to submit themselves to the torture of listening to such rot. And, of course, many people claim that “that’s not music!” And for this reason, I’m sometimes wary of even telling people about my band, The Tajalli Vortex, because at heart I’m a coward, afraid of the negative reactions, and I can’t even be bothered to engage in a bit of debate about something I love.

So why do I love it? And why should anyone love it? Well, it’s probably most instructive to explain how I discovered this music and grew to love it myself.

In my early 20s, I was a huge fan of the bassist Bill Laswell. It came about because I was a fan of Gong in my teens: Laswell played on the 1979 album New York Gong / About Time, and I was instantly hooked on his unique but incredibly funky style. I started buying every Laswell record I could lay my hands on (and there are a hell of a lot of them!)

Then one day I came home with a new Laswell acquisition, The Noise of Trouble. I put it on the record player… and wondered what had hit me. It was half-an-hour of meaningless noise, no discernable funky basslines, just… noise. Ugly, horrible, headache-inducing noise. I was really disappointed, but also really, really puzzled. I knew this guy was an incredible musician, I had a huge amount of respect for everything else I’d heard from him… so why did he feel it necessary to put out a whole record of useless crap? Fascinated, I put the record on again. Over the next few weeks, I would listen to it intently, but without any pleasure, almost every day, sometimes two or three times in a row, trying to discern some nugget of redeeming music within its harsh melée of sound.

Then one day, something strange happened. I guess I was onto about my 20th or 25th listen, and suddenly it just clicked! And it was more beautiful, more complex, more rewarding than anything I’d ever heard before. And I’ve never looked back.

That experience taught me a very valuable lesson: that which is worthwhile is not necessarily easy. To paraphrase a famous advertising slogan, good things come to those who make an effort. Many people believe that the most important redeeming quality for a piece of music is that it be “catchy”: if it doesn’t have an instant hook to pull you in and make you love it, then it’s somehow second-rate. Although there is an element of this prejudice in all branches of the arts, it seems to be strongest in music: few people would expect you to fall in love with a James Joyce novel or a Jackson Pollock painting without putting in a little effort, and many people recognise that the rewards that come from considering Joyce or Pollock are greater than those that come from considering Barbara Taylor Bradford or Jack Vettriano.

Free-improv is challenging music, it is music that demands your full attention in order to be appreciated, but again I think that this is a good thing. We live in an age when music is increasingly expected to serve as a backdrop to all aspects of life. Whether you’re shopping, having a bath, doing the washing up, reading a book, operating heavy machinery… people increasingly feel a need to have a stream of music babbling in the background, somewhere on the borders of consciousness. I admit to being as guilty as anyone on this charge, but I also strongly believe that it devalues music and makes us less capable of appreciating both complex music and, just as importantly, silence. Free-improv bucks the trend. Free-improv is not elevator music! It demands the devotion of 100% of your mind. If you are able to give that then the results are incredibly beneficial for the soul. (But it’s not always easy - there are still many times when I don’t have the mental strength to cope with such demanding music, in fact most of the time I will relax with something easily digestible rather than putting myself through the mental workout that complex music demands).

I’ll just recount here one other fruitful experience I once had defending free-improv and noise music. The guitarist Pat Metheny is generally thought of as a purveyor of rather middle-of-the-road, easy-listening jazz guitar music. However, underneath that cuddly exterior he has an affinity for the wilder side of jazz, in particular the music of Ornette Coleman. As well as some fairly out-there collaborations with the likes of Coleman and Sheffield-born free-improv prime mover Derek Bailey, in 1994 Metheny released an album called Zero Tolerance for Silence which polarised (read: with very few exceptions, disgusted) his fans. At the time, I had recently got online and, although yet to hook up to the Internet, I was very active on CompuServe, in particular on their jazz forum. On the forum, there was an outpouring of outrage that Metheny had the temerity to insult his many fans by releasing an album of such unlistenable dross. I was one of, I think, only two people willing to defend the album, and as a result suffered ridicule and flaming from other members. But I did get probably the best imaginable reward for my forthright comments: a beautifully sweet email from Pat Metheny’s mum, thanking me for standing up for her son!

We have been forwarded this message by an artist:

I have recently come through (unscathed financially) the following scam which I suggest you tell as many people as possible. If you sell your work from websites or over the internet in any way, beware.

Someone who calls himself Broeer Zetman from Sweden asked (by email) for some prices of carvings from my website and I sent him a list with prices. He wrote back choosing about £3,000 worth of work and said he would send a cheque for £5,500 to cover the costs of packing and shipping to Sweden. The cheque would be paid from a British Bank by a customer of his. My offer to do the transaction by Paypal wasn't taken up. Eventually the cheque arrived and I banked it. It showed up in my internet bank statement as 'cleared'. I was suspicious so I didn't send my work off in a hurry. On later communication with the bank, I learned that they (the bank) can't guarantee ANY cheques to be cleared unless special arrangements are made on presentation. Then I learned, after further requests that the cheque was invalid (I presume counterfeit or stolen). I was lucky because I didn't get to the next stage of the scam which is something to do with writing a cheque yourself to the 'art buyer' to forward onto the shippers. When this happens, you lose your money and then you find later that the incoming payment in your bank doesn't exist after all.

Scammers often try to trick people using similar "cashback" schemes. Here is an article on the Metropolitan Police website which describes this kind of fraud in more detail.

This article appeared in the first ever edition of FAD Magazine, back in 2002. We are reprinting it here to celebrate the launch of Deuteronomy by Entropy8Zuper , and the newly repackaged Godlove Museum.

When FAD asked me to write a piece about web-art, at first I was stumped. You see, for one thing there’s not a lot of it out there. Oh sure, there are a lot of people who claim to be making art online, but more often than not all they have done is discovered a creative new use for Photoshop filters or a clever way of using Flash’s ActionScripting – you know the kind of thing “wow, just look at the way these spirals are following my mouse-pointer. Isn’t that artistic!”

And for that reason, the world (or at least that part of it which expresses a preference) seems to fall into two camps on this subject. There are those (often with backgrounds in “offline” art) who claim that no meaningful piece of art has ever been created with a computer, and pretty much sneer at the very idea. And there are those who think that the Internet is rife with artistic talent (usually the same people who get excited about screen-savers).

But in a small, well hidden corner of the Internet (rumoured to be somewhere in Belgium) a dynamic-html-duo have been busily working for 3 years now churning out stuff which could give Leonardo or Hirst a run for their money.

They style themselves Entropy8Zuper! - they being 2 artists formerly known as Entropy8 and Zuper! The Entropy8 part is Auriea Harvey, while Zuper! Is Michäel Samyn. Or perhaps “was” would be more appropriate. Because despite the double-barrelled name, Entropy8Zuper! (let’s just call them E8Z! shall we?) is more than a partnership of two halves. Their entire body of work explores the nature of their relationship, the creation of a whole. Their motto: “Information Technology is not the future. We are.”

Too engrossed in their work to actively seek out the limelight, they nonetheless won a Webby award (the Internet’s equivalent of the Oscars) for their art. The trophy now takes pride of place, on top of the couple’s toilet, and the $30,000 prize money allowed them to fulfil a long-held desire to pay for advanced 3d body-scans of themselves snogging (now seen in their work The Kiss) and to have their movements motion-captured (the raw materials for two Quake models of Michäel and Auriea playing Adam and Eve and the subsequent Eden.Garden1.0).

So what is it that makes their work “art” rather than computer-noodling?

It helps that both of them are very skilled and experienced, with a rare combination of design backgrounds and technical-mastery (they are at ease, or perhaps more accurately frustrated at the limitations of, a wide range of tools and languages from dynamic-HTML through Flash to Perl scripting). Shades of the old-school renaissance-person, apprenticeship under the belt, all the right moves at their command. But it’s the emotion and the intelligence with which they execute their work that makes it appeal to the heart as well as the mind.

Their first large-scale work was Genesis, a biblically inspired retelling of the origins of their relationship. And what a crazy one-of-a-kind relationship: they met and conducted their love affair online before leaving respective partners (Michäel in Belgium, Auriea in New York) to make the virtual real. Bitten by the bible-bug and the metaphors they found there, they continued their Godlove story with Exodus, Leviticus and, most recently, Numbers. Each chapter in their story is a compelling combination of elements. There is the intensely personal, your common-or-garden website confessional transformed with unrivalled panache: in Leviticus, as you pluck at flower-petals, you are given a line-by-line transcript of E8Z!’s former lovers’ parting sadness and rage. There is the tongue-in-cheek, biblical references become literal: in Leviticus, Auriea and Michäel are lambs of god, small fluffy toys which bleat and scream as you click on them. There are the gaming elements, essential for any interactive work to hold the viewers interest: in Exodus, you get to shoot down trans-atlantic planes using Michäel’s brain-power as a weapon, and in Numbers your targets are paratroopers, corporate logos emblazoned on their chutes (the corresponding company’s stock-quote decreases with each one that you down). And of course there are the common elements, flotsam and netsam carried over from one work to the next, symbolic references that hammer home the meaning of these pieces: hands, eyes, hearts, flowers.

With Numbers, and its accompanying pseudo-marketing the making of Numbers, their work has reached a higher symbolic and political level. Auriea being an exiled New Yorker, and their early work focusing on aeroplane flights to and from that city, the events of September 11^th took on great significance for the couple. They had already been planning Numbers for over a year when current affairs threw the whole thing into a new perspective: George Bush taking on God in a no-holds-barred incitement contest (compare and contrast the quotes below).

The resulting product is, hyperbole aside, an interactive masterpiece. Go see for yourself .

Those quotes in full:

God:

When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan

Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:

And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. 

But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell. 

Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I thought to do unto them.

(Numbers 33, 51-53 & 55-56)

George Bush:

I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.

we will find those who did it; we will smoke them out of their holes; we will get them running and we'll bring them to justice.

We’re fighting evil.

Your mission is defined, your objectives are clear, your goal is just.

Defeat the evildoers.

I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us.

(various speeches, September-October 2001)

Paul P Priestley (“Peep” to his friends) is one of the greatest artists working in the UK today. If you haven’t heard of him, this is not surprising: he does not court art market attention, works primarily for his own satisfaction, and his work has mainly been seen only by those lucky enough to stumble upon his small but crowded workspace within Sheffield’s BLOC studios. Inside, it is like something from the cabinet of Jan Svankmajer: deformed and cross-bred dolls and other toys form intricate tableaux and, if you are lucky enough to visit when there is enough sunlight to feed his creations’ solar panels, they come alive and move around the studio. But although on the surface his creations could be seen as dark toys and curious distractions, they are the outward signs of a vigorous intelligence, part of a body of work which (along with his series of anthropomorphised churches) seeks answers to recurring questions about the role of religion within the power structures of modern life.

His latest show, his first at BLOCspace, opens on Friday 1^st December and continues until Sunday 17^th December. The gallery’s website describes the show thus:

P. P. Priestley’s inaugural exhibition at Bloc fills both the gallery and the outside courtyard. His large-scale sculptures of anthropomorphised churches function as elegant formal sculptures, whilst simultaneously constituting the elements of an installation that presents a carefully constructed narrative. Left as basic wooden frames, these personifications of the Christian Church are stripped bare of their function and exterior trappings and appear to perform deviant acts. One lays crumpled in a heap in the gallery while another appears to be trying to climb the gallery wall. Priestley's smaller works, constructed from parts of dolls and model animals, are presented in sometimes disturbing tableaux, juxtapose sado-masochistic, religious and bestial imagery.

Priestley's use of automata has been prevalent in his work for a number of years. Using DIY mechanics he creates kinetic sculptures that often use solar power as an energy source. His sculptures contain archetypal and symbolic imagery: angels, winged horses, cherubs and demons. “Most of the work depends on what materials I can find to recycle at the time”, he says. “I’ve used windmills, waterwheels, bicycle pumps and hand-cranked generators – all my materials are things that other people have thrown away”.

FAD caught up with Peep on the eve of his show’s opening, and asked a few questions. Below are his answers (and a few from his technicians Brodie and Nick, who wandered in and out during the course of the interview): (more…)